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Brief Communications
Nature 427, 29 (1 January 2004) | doi:10.1038/427029a
Secrets of successful stone-skipping
Christophe Clanet1, Fabien Hersen2 & Lydéric Bocquet3
Abstract
Hitting the water at a magic angle gives top performance in a time-honoured pastime.
Abstract
Skipping stones across water has been a popular pastime for thousands of years — the rules of the game have remained unchanged since the time of the ancient Greeks1 — and the world record, set by J. Coleman-McGhee in 1992, is believed to be 38 rebounds2. Following earlier attempts3, 4, 5, 6 to analyse the physics of this ancestral human activity, we focus here on the crucial moment in stone skipping: when the stone bounces on the water's surface. By monitoring the collision of a spinning disc with water, we have discovered that an angle of about 20° between the stone and the water's surface is optimal with respect to the throwing conditions and yields the maximum possible number of bounces.
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